A portfolio is a collection of work. For our purposes, this work is done by an author, e.g. a student, and is reviewed by one or more evaluators, e.g. a teacher and/or others, to assess the work, e.g. the progress of the student in learning a particular subject. Most of the prior art has dealt with hard copy portfolios. However, modern approaches use digital representations of work/portfolios.
The field of digital portfolios is a relatively new one. The concept of using portfolios of student work as part of student evaluations was described in Theodore Sizer's 1988 book, "Horace's Compromise." In this book, Sizer describes the dilemma of a typical high school teacher in attempting to teach and evaluate students with wide ranges of abilities using classical teaching methods. He proposes the concept of student portfolios of work to replace the more rigid concepts of numerical or letter grades.
The Coalition of Essential Schools at Brown University has published some early work where scanned and computer generated documents are displayed as student works, and where teacher comments can be filed alongside the original documents. The Authentic Convergence Assessment Technologies proposed a product based on this "Coalition" approach called "Persona Plus". This product proposed to store student work in a database, where it could be recalled for evaluation by parents, teachers and others. It does not suggest annotation.
These approaches concern a multimedia display of one or more portfolios, made up of individual student projects where each project may contain text documents, as well as sound, graphics, and other multimedia clips. Such a portfolio could consist of a collection of files stored on various computer servers connected into a network.
Annotation of data files is generally known. Annotation of the HyperTest Markup Language (HTML) data files used by World Wide Web (WWW) viewers is supported by the freeware Mosaic browser and a few others. Some browsers have had the capability of associating comments with these portfolios. However, such annotation is always stored locally on a single user's computer and does not become part of the original material in any way.